I found myself remembering a book I’d read where a woman looked in a mirror for the first time after seven years in a gulag, and the face looking back wasn’t her own, but that of her mother. I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it.
